for thoughts and other useless things

tax time .

right outside my work there’s a poster of some guy strapped to a hospital bed with wires attached to his chest and arms around him everywhere. a small suction pipe is coming out of his mouth, and someone is shining a torch into his right eyeball. white pillows, white sheets, white latex gloves. he is obviously not very well.

in big bold font at the top it says “SOME COLD HARD FACTS ABOUT TAKING ECSTASY,” an obvious pun if you were to read the smaller print at lower down that tells you ecstacy cooks your body from the inside.

at the very bottom, in smaller font, it says “national drugs campaign. authorised by the australian government” with a federal logo in the right hand corner.

i’ve seen a couple of these posters around in bus shelters and rotating billboards around the city. they’re rather disgusting, yet probably don’t provide the shock factor that the government was after.

but i don’t have a problem with the druggies or advertisements as much as the cost of this advertising campaign. having suddenly become a tax payer (and paying a couple of thousand worth in tax this year which is a lot of weeks worth of rent) i must say that i really don’t want my money contributed to warnings that will help dumb people survive.

sure, maybe a bit of a scare might make the drug takers think twice, but i honestly don’t care about the people that are about to make the choice to overdose, and i doubt many taxpayers do. even though we want our citizens to live a long and healthy lifestyle, nurturing druggies is not the way to go.

i’m not saying that we should just let these people die; it’s not like i’m campaigning for the hospitals to stop trying to save druggies or anything (yet). i’m just saying that maybe the federal government should find more useful ways to spend their money, like on real education (e.g. funding for st george girls high school!) for people that actually contribute to society (e.g. not druggies).